Month: March 2009

I’m not going to ramble on about how tough things are. I’m probably better equipped than most to weather the current economic storm, but am facing a minor problem which gives me a little sympathy for those who are more vulnerable than I am.

In my “day job” we were engaged by a Customer to do some work, which we were assured they wanted done by the end of March (“to use this year’s budget”, does that sound familiar?). Anyway, work being scarce, we set about it with a will. Now, we are part way through (but with nothing tangible “delivered”) and the customer is delaying making decisions. They are satisfied with what has been done so far, but are taking a very long time to authorise the next step. The problem is, this means we have people idle, or shortly to be idle, and we’re all wondering whether we should be looking for other work. Naturally most of us are. I hope the situation reaches a resolution soon, and certainly before we reach a point where I suddenly have two jobs! I’ve got to sympathise with the Customer as well. Things aren’t easy for them either.

I’ve just been writing a few lines about the above subjects in response to some training questions. I’m not going to repeat what I wrote here but “it makes you think, doesn’t it?”. In this case what it makes me think about is, the way, we react to people:

Based not on what they are, but on who they remind us of,

Based on the role we’ve put them in,

Based on the way we think they are acting towards us, or the way we expect them to act.

The terminology used to describe these phenomena can be confusing, and downright strange, but there is no doubt in my mind that they partly explain some behaviour I have seen in myself and others.